Free The Revenge of Geography by Robert D. Kaplan

though he spent most of his life in Turkey. Moreover, neither Turkey nor Iran has suffered a colonial relationship at the hands of the other. Geographically, their spheres of influence, though overlapping, are to a large degree separate, with Iran lying laterally to the east of Turkey. During the Shah’s reign, both Turkey and Iran were pro-Western, and even when Iran turned radical under the mullahs, Ankara was careful to maintain correct relations with Tehran. There is little historically shocking about Ankara’s embrace of the ayatollahs, even as in a contemporary political context it had considerable shock value.
    Consider: the United States, under a universally popular president at the time, Barack Obama, was trying desperately, along with its European allies, to forestall Iran’s march to obtaining nuclear weapons, so as to prevent Israel from launching an attack on Iran; a nuclear Iran would change the balance of power in the Middle East dramatically against the West, while an Israeli attack against Iran might even be worse in terms of destabilizing the region. Yet in May 2010, Turkey, along with Brazil, acted through a series of dramatic diplomatic maneuvers to help Iran evade economic sanctions and thus gain critical time in order to make such a bomb. By agreeing to enrich Iran’s uranium, Turkey acquired yet more stature in the Islamic world to go along with that which it has acquired by supporting Hamas in Gaza. Iran has the potential “to help Turkey realize its core strategic goal of becoming an energy hub, delivering natural gas and oil [from Iran] to the markets of Western Europe.” 9 With Turkeyan energy transfer nexus for Iran, as well as for hydrocarbons coming from the Caspian Sea across the Caucasus, even as Turkey holds the power to divert as much as 90 percent of Iraq’s water intake from the Euphrates and 40 percent of Syria’s, Turkey joins Iran as a Middle East hyperpower, with pipelines running in all directions filled with oil, natural gas, and water—the very basis of industrial life. 10
    Before the Oil Age, as I’ve suggested, Turkey advanced into the Balkans and Europe in order to develop the economic capacity so that it could also advance into the Middle East. In the Oil Age, it is the other way around. As Turkey becomes a European conduit for Iranian and Caspian Sea oil, it becomes too important an economic factor for Europe to ignore. Rather than be merely a land bridge, albeit the largest land bridge on the globe, Turkey—a G-20 country—has become a core region in and of itself, which, along with Iran, has the capacity to neutralize the Arab Fertile Crescent, whose societies are beset by internal upheaval caused by decades of sterile national security regimes.
    Furthermore, the move by Turkey and Brazil to safeguard Iran’s enriched uranium was more than a rogue action of little practical consequence to help fundamentalist Iran acquire a nuclear bomb. It reflected the rise of middle-level powers around the world, as more and more millions from developing countries joined the middle class.
    The silver lining for the West is the following: without the ascent of Turkey, revolutionary Iran becomes the dominant power in the Middle East; but with Turkey’s aggressive rise as a Middle Eastern power for the first time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Iran will have competition from next door—for Turkey can at once be Iran’s friend and competitor. And don’t forget, Turkey still belongs to NATO, and it still has relations with Israel, however frayed. As difficult as it has become for the West to tolerate, Turkey’s Islamist leadership still represents a vast improvement over the mind-set of the Iranian clerical government. Turkey can still act as a mediator between Israel and Muslim countries, just as Iran holds the potential yet to modify its own politics, either through political upheaval or through the wages of the regime’s own longevity and contradictions.What is